


Silence Keepers Universe

by KikiYushima



Series: Silence Keepers universe [1]
Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Analysis, Essays, Nonfiction, Other, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-08
Updated: 2017-10-08
Packaged: 2019-01-10 18:14:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12304833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KikiYushima/pseuds/KikiYushima
Summary: So here it is. This is my big explanation for how things in the Silence Keepers universe differ from the main Fates world. Hopefully this will minimise author's notes on all future fics.





	Silence Keepers Universe

**Author's Note:**

> So here it is. This is my big explanation for how things in the Silence Keepers universe differ from the main Fates world. Hopefully this will minimise author's notes on all future fics.

Let me preface this post with something important: I fell in love with Fates from the first trailer. I was hyped as shit about the game when it first came out. I followed the hype train closely, looking for every little bitty scrap of information I could get that didn't go into plot spoiler territory.  
  
Then I got the game and played all three routes.  
  
I was so disappointed, frustrated, and angry with the writing.  
  
There was  _so much potential_ in the game that it drove me crazy. I loved the ideas, characters, and world presented. I love the  _potential_ the game had to be a great story, but it was squandered because IntSys bit off  _way_ more than they could chew. It was  _too_ ambitious for the short amount of time it was in development.  
  
Please do understand that I  _love_ the world, lore, and such behind the game, but I  _hate the actual game itself_. The writing is just  _way_ too loose and flat for my liking.    
  
Because of this, my Fates world is that it diverges  _heavily_ from canon. Points that I thought should have been major things in the writing were barely even acknowledged, so I decided to change that.   
  
First, let me say that I understand, from a  _narrative_  perspective, many of these issues weren't addressed: they're meant to be major twists. If they were acknowledged as such, they wouldn't be. I address them in-universe because they're points that the characters should  _logically_ acknowledge. (Then again, Fates and logic do not go hand in hand.)  
  
What am I going on about?  
  
A lot of the main points I play on are the previous generation. I mainly give characterisation to people like Katerina (Xander's mother), Ikona (the Hoshidan siblings' biological mother), Arete (Aqua/Azura's mother), and even Mikoto.  
  
It bother me to no end that these individuals get next to no development outside of a passing mention or are so warped that it's impossible to know their original personality or are so bland they might as well be white bread.  
  
Needless to say, my additional characterisation for them changes things  _a lot_.  
  
One of the most major things that's involved in this is Arete. Instead of just kind of...existing in a vacuum, she had a  _major_ impact on the Nohrian siblings. The siblings are extremely close because she kept them all close to her while they were growing up before her execution. There are no real divisions between the siblings and they're basically inseparable.  
  
Another major thing is the Hoshidan siblings vs Ikona and Mikoto. From a narrative point, I can understand  _how_ (aside from Ryoma) they wouldn't know Corrin is their sibling. If Mikoto mainly stayed off to the  _side_  and the only came into their lives  _after_ Ikona died, it would make sense they didn't know.  
  
_However_ , in my world,  _they all know Cami* isn't related to them_. This is because Sumeragi brought Mikoto in as his concubine for protection. This means that Ryoma and Hinoka would have both been old enough to see that Cami was born  _before_ Mikoto came into their lives. (Ikona was still pregnant with Takumi at the time.) This doesn't diminish their love for Cami in the  _slightest_. Most people outside of the court don't know this, however.  
  
* Obviously my take on Corrin   
  


* * *

  
This also leads into a pretty major point about character  _reinterpretations_. The writing in the characters is probably one of my biggest issues with Fates as a whole. Because of this, I reinterpreted a  _number_ of characters to make them into something  _I_ find more palatable. Others are different simply because of how their muses developed. There is  _nothing_ I can do about the latter point and changing them now is impossible.  
  
Let's start off with Mikoto.  
Why is she so important?  
_Because she's not a fucking doormat or perfect_.  
First off, her  _actual_ name is Eirene. Mikoto just doesn't make  _any_ sense for a Vallite to have if Arete, Kadros, and Azura are anything to go off. So if you see any mentions of "Eirene" in a fic, they generally mean Mikoto's  _true_ self.  
This"true" self is actually something akin to the Awakening kids. She and Arete grew up in a hellacious environment of constrant strife and combat much like the Awakening kids. Eirene is a battle-hardened, frontline tactician that doesn't take shit lying down. She will fight tooth and nail for those she loves and believes in. She's a master warrior and mage that's  _very_ difficult to go toe-to-toe with, let alone  _best_. She blunt and very rough and tumble.  
Why is she so serene as Mikoto then?  
Mikoto is literally nothing but a mask.  
When she arrived in Hoshido, she didn't fit in. Hoshido's culture is all about conformity and blending in, so she molded herself into a Yamato Nadeshiko archetype. She kind of fell into the China doll since acting like this de-spirited her so much and became a bit of a pushover when it came to fighting Nohr and in politics.   
  
Xander.    
He'll be notably in the background of most fics because I'm terrified of backlash from Xander fans. Mine seems to have pretty severe Autism (see Coded Silence Ch 1 for more information), so he requires  _a lot_ of support to even  _function_. He's got a very innocent, childlike view on things. He  _can_ and  _does_ act like he does in canon, but that's entirely a mask. He's honestly really damn broken and upset when it comes down to it.  
He _loathes_ speaking which lead to the development of something called Nohrian Coded Sign Language. That is a language which is somewhere between a sign language and Morse code. It's mainly used through tapping where someone (that understands it) can see via a series of long and short taps. It's his and Leo's primary method of communication.    
  
Camilla.  
I'll just say this: I can't fucking stand yanderes.  
I changed her characterisation entirely.  
She's still a very emotionally disturbed young woman due to all the hell she's been through, but it more manifests itself in subtle ways. She doesn't really react to most situations strongly. Honestly, she barely even emotes. She actually has a goddamn moral compass that doesn't revolve around Corrin. In fact, she's the  _main_ support and rock for her family. She takes care of Xander and Leo and dedicates her  _everything_ to them.  
This stems from the fact Arete more or less raised her on her own. Arete cared for all of the siblings after Katerina's death up until her own. With that, Camilla stepped in and became the support her siblings so desperately needed.  
  
Leo.  
This poor bab.  
Due to reasons that will be explained in Reflections, he's actually quite frail and sickly. These reasons caused his mother's pregnancy to be very troubled and he was born two months early. She gave him up to Arete because she thought he would die, but Arete managed to save him.  
Unfortunately, due to his premature birth, it left him with raging fevers for the first three years of his life. It damaged his vocal cords to the point he's effectively mute and left his immune system compromised. He falls ill  _very_ easily and gets high fevers on a regular basis. Since his vocal cords were so damaged, he has to rely on Nohrian Coded Sign Language as his primary method of communcation.  
He's a sweet, gentle boy that flees at the first sign of conflict.  
Elise.  
While she's still a little ball of sunshine, she's a Silence Keeper (explained further down). This means she's very much silk hiding steel and she is  _not_ somebody to cross. She's a little badass and  _very_ cunning. She's an omniglot of the highest degree and knows somewhere around a dozen different languages. She's still very sweet and kind, but you just don't want to cross her.  
  
I'll just knock out three birds with one stone here: Laslow, Serena, and Odin...or Isaiah, Luna, and Marius in my world.  
Why are they so different?  
  
I take their fathers into account (Gregor, Kellam, and Ricken respectively).  
Isaiah isn't a flirt but can come across as such. He's very flippant, warm, and open. A lot of the things he says and does can come across as pretty words that mean nothing, but there's a genuine  _warmth_ behind them that is hard to deny if you're on the receiving end of them. He does his best to bring smiles to the faces of those around him through his words and deeds since he knows what it's like to be in constant fear and anxiety.  
He took Isaiah over Laslow since Isaiah is much  _softer_ name than Laslow and fits his soft personality better.    
  
Luna...stands out when it comes to naming for different reasons.  
First: I  _hate_ Severa as a name. It's  _awful_. So I default to Serena being her  _real_ name. Hence the alias Luna.  
Second: she's nota tsundere. Cordelia was killed when she was very small so she has no memories of her. Kellam raised her as a single father with a good deal of help from Sumia and Frederick. With Kellam and Sumia acting as her main parental figures, she ended up with a  _very_ soft, quiet, somewhat insecure demeanor. She inherited her father's ability to  _become_ the background, so she's not noticed very often which is honestly just fine with her.  
  
Marius? /vague gestures  
I just really don't know much about him.  
  
Peri also has some pretty radical changes. As said before, I _despise_ the yandere trope. I know she's more of a Blood Knight than a yandere but it's close enough. I can't work with characters that kill just to kill. It goes against everything I write.  
This means I turned her into an  _actual human being_  with  _an actual moral compass_. She refuses to kill needlessly but she still does live to fight. This mainly stems from the fact she has Sherlock Scan abilities but only feels comfortable using them on the battlefield. She just doesn't feel like it's right to use them against people off the battlefield unless it's protecting someone she cares about or herself.  
So, when it comes down to it, she's more about finding people to be  _worthy_ challengers for her abilities and she gets her thrill from battling those people since she can use her abilities to their fullest extent.  
  
Niles definitely has a beast of a change in and of himself. The name he goes by is Rene Favager which roughly translates to "forged rebirth" in French (my analogue for the Nestran language). He's actually a very calm, collected, laid-back man that takes a lot to actually rustle his jammies. He doesn't really innuendo at people.  
What caused this radical shift?  
He was actually a  _very_ feared assassin before he became Leo's retainer because of how utterly  _sadistic_ he was. People feared getting Melchior Kranz or Niles called on them. Brutality was his calling card and even the authorities were powerless to stop him with how good he was.  
Some six years before canon, a Nestran noble family adopted him. He isn't super forthcoming with any details, but all I know is that they fell somehow a year later and he then he protected his adoptive sister for the next year. She died which led him to break into Castle Krackenburg with the hope of dying by castle guard for being caught.  
His hopes were dashed when he found a sickly boy wandering the halls with a dangerously high fever. He took Leo back to his room on Brynhildr's instructions (he's a Silence Keeper for currently unknown reasons). When he saw the scarring on Leo's torso, he knew he had to stay and help since he was seeing what  _true_ sadism was.  
  
That does lead me into one major point about possessed!Garon and how he treats the kids. In Corrin's Conquest supports with Gunter, it's stated that Garon wanted Corrin starved/beaten (dependent on gender) which implies that he might have done that to  _all_ of his children. Needless to say, it happened to  _all_ of my children  _and_ their retainers. It's a pretty fucking major shaping force for them.  
  
What about the rest of the retainers? I just haven't touched them yet.   
  
What about the Hoshidan sibs? While I have a major Hoshido bias, my Nohrian siblings are more developed than them...aside from Takumi.   
  
Ryoma is basically just chill as fuck and it takes a lot to actually get him to react strongly to anything. He just takes life one day at a time.  
He is quite warm and connects with people very easily, but he tends to hold himself apart from everyone since he's the crown prince and can't be involved with everybody like he wants to be.  
The main shaping force for him, though, has been his intelligence. He was gifted with a photographic memory but, because of Hoshido's culture of conformity, his teachers passively-aggressively put him down by calling him "lazy" for using it. It caused him to try to divorce himself from it as best he could and suppress that part of himself. It led to him becoming extremely irritable and frustrated because he was  _many_ years ahead of where he should have been in terms of education, but he never got challenged. It also made him  _highly_ distrustful of adults until he hit seventeen himself.  
The most major shaping event for him, though, was the kidnapping. It's because he, Hinoka, Takumi, and Cami  _were all there_. He and his blood siblings all saw Sumeragi killed.  
The worst part is that he had a decision to make: did he save Takumi or Cami from being taken?  
Needless to say, he chose Takumi.   
This ties in with another decision he made which had repercussions on  _the entire family_.  
With Sumeragi and Ikona dead, Mikoto was next in line for the throne. Hoshido was in  _massive_ disarray due to losing one of its most beloved monarchs in recent history.  
His siblings were destroyed and hurting because of what they'd witnessed.  
He could help Mikoto and help learn the ins and outs of court, getting a lot of practical experience f he ultimately ascends the throne while possibly getting the mental stimulation and challenge he'd been craving since he was a young child;  _or_ he could put Hoshido to the side and pull his siblings out of their anger (Hinoka) and depression (Takumi) through supporting them.  
He chose the former and regrets his decision to this day.  
  
Hinoka isn't the harsh, combat-obssessed commander she's portrayed as in game. She's actually fairly soft, sweet, and kind with an aspiration to become a Yamato Nadeshiko housewife. The main thing preventing her from attaining that is the fact she's pretty clumsy off the battlefield which means she breaks things very easily. It's what made her turn all of her attention to combat. She also has a tendency to get excited easily and speak too much or word something badly before she has to back up and explain herself better.  
She  _does_ have her canon characterisation while she's on the battlefield though.   
  
Takumi... He's the most developed of them and he breaks my heart.  
_This poor bab_.  
His base personality is the same but the reasons behind why he acts the way he does are far different.  
He has a very soft, sweet, gentle, supportive personality that he tries to protect by being extremely harsh and cruel to people. Similarly to Peri, he's  _very_ good at reading people and picking out their physical and emotional weaknesses. He uses it to his advantage to drive them away. He's absolutely  _terrified_ of being hurt or losing somebody again.  
It stems from his childhood and the fact he was  _very_ close to Cami. They were a lot like twins. He was actually  _there_ to see her kidnapping and Sumeragi's death. He heard her screams as Garon took her away. He saw the light fade from his father's eyes as he died.  _He was the only one to hear his father's final words_.  
This was followed  _very_ shortly after by his teachers openly berating him for being  _too_ smart. Just a few months after  _that_ , he was called a traitor for going  _way_ faster than the traditional Hoshidan royal education allowed (check out Broken Wings for further explanation).  
This sent him down a path of depression, anxiety, PTSD, and self-hatred. He's an ESFJ with traits of the ENFJ, INFJ, and ISFJ and an Empathy Quotient of 67/80. He feels  _each and every_ harsh word he slings at people and hates himself even more for it. He ultimately self-harms by cutting over his heart so he can experience some of the pain he inflicted on others.  
It all culminated in a suicide attempt when he was thirteen.  
  
Sakura has her differences but she's not super developed. She's a little bit of a recluse since she has music-based synesthesia. She quite literally sees the world through it. Each movement causes music to ring in her head. This means that if she sees grass rustling in the wind, she'll see  _every blade of grass singing_. It means she really doesn't leave the castle much since the world is just  _so overwhelming_ for her.  
  
Aqua is mostly the same aside from the fact her name is Reiko since she tried to go native in Hoshido.  
  
I don't really have any of the retainers developed outside of Oboro. She's basically the same.  
  
Hana is the other major one I have developed. Her name is actually  _Hannah_ though her public Hoshidan name is  _Hanako._ She  _is_ full-blooded Hoshidan, not half Nohrian. She has the name Hannah because her stepmother named her. She's actually a child of rape. Her biological mother raped her father. Her father  _begged_ her mother to not give the baby up and that he'd raise the baby himself and that she wouldn't need to be involved with the baby's life. She agreed and carried to term. Her father then allowed his Nohrian fiance to name the girl, hence the weird naming.

* * *

Another major thing is the fact that Camilla and Hinoka have their own divine weapons in Suijin and Kriemhild, a water-elemental naginata and a fire-elemental axe.  
  
The divine weapons also have something I refer to as the "concealed" form. These are tiny forms that the form of some sort of jewellery to make it easy for them to be carried around. This bizarre detail comes from the fact the Fuujin Yumi is Takumi's comfort object and, as a writer, I just couldn't take it away from him in good conscience.

* * *

So about that calendar system...  
  
Yeah it's entirely made up on a lark. It's mainly just a way for me to keep events consistent and keep things organised. 

* * *

Probably the  _biggest_ overall change to the world at large is how the Valla curse works. How it works in canon is stupid and opens up  _way_ too many goddamn plot holes to count.  
  
I changed it into something that's a self-keeping secret. You don't die if you mention it to somebody; the person simply  _forgets_ what you told them. This also goes for if you start figuring something out on your own. If you run into something that's related to Valla, then it'll just slip through your fingers. I haven't defined 100% hard limits on it, though.   
  
This comes with its own set of problems including loophole abuse such as speaking in vagueries and/or metaphor...which is something you  _can_ do you. Loophole abuse is honestly one of my favorite things to do with how this incarnation of the curse works.   
  
And this leads into a major point as well. There are people that are  _immune_ to the curse called Silence Keepers. These people meet one of several criterion:  
1) they lived in Valla and have memories of living there  
2) they are divine weapon wielders that the weapons chose to make immune to the curse  
3) they are simply strong-minded individuals that can withstand the strain of having so much knowledge.  
  
Several people fell into this: Sumeragi, Ikona, Katerina, Arete, Mikoto, Berand (an OC that's Katerina's grandfather), Rene, and Elise.  
  
They  _can_ talk about Valla and everything around it with other Silence Keepers, but if anybody overhears them talking, they'll just forget what they heard.  
  
I'll admit this still has problems to the overall narrative but it works better than the canon one imo.

* * *

The version of the title theme I use is a custom rewrite I dubbed "Silent Voices." Here are the lyrics:   
  
[refrain]  
Deep beneath dusk and dawn,  
Silence rules all  
In the grey, churning earth’s depths.  
Never forget we are one  
With our family that lives above.  
  
[V1]  
Upon the dawn,  
Battered hearts cry out  
Driven far away from those that the love most  
Mourn day and night  
The future, torn from their young hands  
  
Parents cry for their children  
Unable to guide them to loving who they are  
Darkness holds until that day  
That they see the true light  
  
[refrain]  
  
[V2]  
Within the dusk,  
Families face strife,  
Threatening for them to be torn asunder  
Leaving naught but devastation  
In the wide wake.  
  
Protectors shall come and go,  
But in the end,  
All they have is each other.  
Regretting their mistakes,  
Protectors wish they sacrificed  
For hope.  
  
[bridge]  
White and black are not quite as fixed as they seem.  
Hearts from both can connect as one  
To bring peace and smiles to all faces.  
  
Even our silent voices ring as one with theirs  
So never forget that we all need each other to live.  
  
[V3]  
  
Please, stop and think about the future.  
Fate is not something that you should decide on.  
Everyone has the right to their own wishes.   
  
We have our own hopes and dreams  
That you should not take away  
For we have free will.  
We never betrayed you;  
We simply chose to do what we wanted.  
  
[refrain]


End file.
